491–500 of 594 posts
Symptom: rents are too high Cause: insufficient housing supply Solution: disincentivize new construction?
The German construction industry doesn't have any spare capacity as is.
Legislative efforts to limit prices pretty much guarantees that additional capacity will not be forthcoming and that shortages and high prices will continue.
Rent control is almost always a disaster. It benefits current residents at the detriment to everyone else. Look no farther than SF or NYC. I have a friend in NYC paying 2000 a month to be a roommate to a guy paying 1500 for the whole place. Yeah he's paying more than this guy's whole rent, because the apartment is rent controlled.
Regulations like this tend to create incentives for corrupt practices of all kind.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a person living in New York who thinks rent stabilization has been largely more successful than not at achieving its goals, I disagree.
Except it doesn't work, and has been proven to not actually work.
https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/DMQ.pdf
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2015/08/30/...
and plenty more throughout.
Rent control is almost always a disaster. It benefits current residents at the detriment to everyone else. Look no farther than SF or NYC. I have a friend in NYC paying 2000 a month to be a roommate to a guy paying 1500 for the whole place. Yeah he's paying more than this guy's whole rent, because the apartment is rent controlled.
Agree with you about rent control, but I'm assuming that the "guy" must be breaking the law. If people in rent controlled apartments are free to sublet at market rates, that seems like a huge loop hole easily exploited. Regulations like this tend to create incentives for corrupt practices of all kind.
"The analysis of rent control is among the best-understood issues in all of economics, and -- among economists, anyway -- one of the least controversial."
"So now you know why economists are useless: when they actually do understand something, people don't want to hear about it."
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That's odd because it it's pretty much the polar opposite of what I've experienced. Everyone wants to move to the big cities, especially Berlin, as they provide culture and a sense of freedom. You are able to meet like-minded people and are able to experience culture and infrastructure that simply does not exist in rural areas. This of course makes makes the situation for the villages worse as many young people move…
The problem with cities is that they have really bad failure modes. Consider Baltimore. The city has been run by a single political party for decades, and run right into the ground. Notice the trend in these population stats: https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/baltimore-maryland This is a city right next to DC, in an essentially recession proof area with lots of jobs. I've known a number of people who were big prop…
Are schools in the suburbs better than those in the city?
Why is it easier to affect government in suburbs?
I'm not sure if you're discussing Baltimore in particular or if you are making these points generally. I'm not sure on robberies, but I live in Sydney and I don't think there is a big gap between school quality and government participation in suburbs vs cities.
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The problem with cities is that they have really bad failure modes. Consider Baltimore. The city has been run by a single political party for decades, and run right into the ground. Notice the trend in these population stats: https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/baltimore-maryland This is a city right next to DC, in an essentially recession proof area with lots of jobs. I've known a number of people who were big prop…
Are robberies less common in the suburbs? Are schools in the suburbs better than those in the city? Why is it easier to affect government in suburbs? I'm not sure if you're discussing Baltimore in particular or if you are making these points generally. I'm not sure on robberies, but I live in Sydney and I don't think there is a big gap between school quality and government participation in suburbs vs cities.
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I think you are missing the kinds of things that city people consider important. For instance, can you walk from your house to the market, and to the theater, and to the hiking trails? I live in an dense city in Asia and I can do this. Many city dwellers do not drive a car and a significant proportion of those never even learned how. Does your rural area support a dockless shared bike scheme? Can teenagers travel ind…
That all sounds like college, with dorms and a campus shuttle and so on. IMHO, one is expected to grow out of that. The next phase of life awaits. Much later, when you are widowed and you move into an assisted living facility, you can once again have high-density living with few belongings and a shared means of transportation.
As rural living reminds me of elementary school, the same could be said for rural living.
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It works reasonably well in the rest of Germany. As for it not working in Berlin, I have a hard time to come up with _anything_ that works there, so my hunch would be that the housing market in Berlin is broken not because of rent control, but because it's Berlin.
It "works" (in that it doesn't cause problems like rationing by other means like queueing, under the table payments, subletting, or any one of the myriad other problems rent control produces) because it actually does nothing - it results in rents which are equal to what the open market price would have been. Ultimately, if you want to reduce rents AND have a functioning market, you have two options (or a combination…
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Assuming they have a home in Berlin, the fact that they already live there makes them deserving. A home is unlike any other material good and the basis of securing a livelihood, it should not be allowed to exploit tenants for profit. AirBnB'ers and other speculators are of course not deserving at all.
People who own and live in their home in Berlin aren't affected by a rent freeze though. It is only renters, who by definition do not own where they live.